Prince of Secrets (24 page)

‘Your friend, Mr Cobie, Jacobus, Grant. Have you known him long?'

Mr Van Deusen considered, said, ‘Some ten years, I believe.'

‘When did you first meet Mr Grant?

Mr Van Deusen did not immediately answer. He fetched
out a pair of gold-rimmed eye-glasses, put them on, and stared at counsel.

‘You heard my question, Mr Van Deusen?'

‘Oh, yes, indeed. Forgive me, my long sight is not what it was.' He paused, and said in a reflective voice, ‘I first met Mr Grant in a small saloon in Arizona Territory. The name of the town escapes me.'

A buzz ran round the courtroom. An usher called for order.

‘A small saloon in Arizona Territory. What were you doing there, Mr Van Deusen?'

‘I grew tired of the academic life. A mid-life crisis. I had read Horace Greeley, he who said, “Go West, young man!” I was not a young man, but I went west to see that fabulous land.'

His eyes grew misty. He blinked, took off his spectacles and wiped them.

‘You met Mr Grant you say in Arizona. Can you remember the nature of the meeting? Why you befriended him?'

‘Oh, vividly, sir, vividly. Why not?' He became reminiscent. ‘Such a strange creature to meet in that wild land. So much the Easterner, the tenderfoot, the greenhorn. You understand those words, sir? They convey naïveté. I was sorry for him. He was alone, a very cherub, only just twenty-one. He needed a guardian, a father. I flatter myself that for a short time I acted as one. We played chess together.'

He smiled towards Cobie, said, ‘He could almost offer me a game!'

What he
was
offering with such grave earnestness was a travesty of the truth so complete that it nearly convulsed Cobie, who was sitting there looking grave and earnest himself.

‘You offered to help him. What form did this help take?'

‘Oh, I had accommodated myself to Western living, and
helped him to do so. He was too civilised, you see. I taught him to use a rifle, to play poker.' He offered these remarkable lies with a straight face.

‘He was not a gunman, then, when you met him?'

‘A
gunman
!' Mr Van Deusen laughed softly. ‘Oh, no. He was a most civilised law-abiding young man. Cultured, very. I remember we discussed Shakespeare together. Such a pleasure to find a
litterateur
in the wilderness.' He paused. ‘It is all in my book.'

‘In your book, Mr Van Deusen? You wrote a book about your experiences?'

‘Oh, yes.
An Easterner Goes West
. Mr Grant features in it, briefly. You must understand that meeting him was like finding water in the desert. Nothing that has been said in this courtroom has revealed the true man he was…is…erudite, cultured, witty. My starved aesthetic and intellectual senses were revived again. I can quote from it if you like. My memory is good—if not as good as Mr Grant's.'

‘No need for that,' said the judge. ‘Although the book may be put in as evidence if you have a copy here in England.'

‘Oh, yes, my lord. I will hand it into court tomorrow.'

Sir Darcy continued. Mr Van Deusen's impersonation of an absent-minded academic turned banker was so complete that even Cobie, watching him, began to believe that he might be telling the truth!

‘What was Mr Grant doing in this township where you met him?'

‘He was on a sketching and painting holiday. He had his equipment with him. Another sign of the dude.'

He turned and addressed the judge, who had his mouth open to question him. ‘A Western term, my lord, which denotes innocence. You must understand that he was the
cause of some hilarity among the roughnecks who frequented the West.

‘Why, one rude fellow had the gall to call him pretty little Cobie! Whilst I naturally deplored this, I confess I understood why he did so on seeing my friend in all his innocent glory. He insisted on keeping clean, you see. Not common in the West, sir.'

The courtroom erupted yet again. The person who enjoyed the joke against himself the most was Mr Jacobus Grant.

‘How long were you together, Mr Van Deusen?'

‘Some fourteen months, I believe.'

‘By what name was he going under?'

Mr Van Deusen mimed surprise. ‘By his own, of course, Jacobus Grant.'

‘Did he ever, whilst he was with you, call himself Jake Coburn?'

‘No, indeed.'

‘Perhaps after you left?'

‘Oh, we left the West together, our mild adventures over.' Mr Van Deusen spectacles misted again: he took them off and wiped them.

‘I repeat the question: “He never called himself Jake Coburn, or was called that by others?”'

‘Oh, no, sir.' He thought for a moment. ‘But I do remember the name. A gunman, a most notorious youth, very unlike Mr Grant, then and now. A dirty scoundrel, fast with a gun, slow with everything else. Notorious for a short time—as many were.'

‘He was not Mr Grant, then?'

‘Oh dear, no. The mind boggles. A gunman who could recite most of Shakespeare by heart!' He shook his head. ‘And I mustn't forget Tennyson and
The Idylls of the King
. He certainly enlivened the desert evenings for me. Particu
larly when he was nursing me through a bad attack of valley fever. I owed him my life, my lord.'

Well, that was one way of describing the result of two bullets in the back from robbers who were busy robbing a bigger thief than themselves, Cobie thought.

‘Did you ever visit the township of San Miguel in New Mexico—or the camp called Hell's End?'

‘No, indeed, sir.'

‘He did not blow up trains when he was with you, then?'

Mr Van Deusen treated himself to a little explosion of gentle chuckles.

‘By no means, too busy sketching and painting, and learning to become a little worldly wise. I flatter myself that I started him off on his subsequent career.'

Sir Darcy opened his mouth to ask another question; the judge interrupted him.

‘I believe, Sir Darcy, that you have made your point. Mr Van Deusen was in the West with Mr Grant, and has testified that during that time, he was not Mr Jake Coburn, nor was he ever in this…township…San Miguel. Any further questions are mere embroidery. You have made your point.'

‘One moment, my lord. I wish to ask Mr Van Deusen a question about the baccarat game which is at issue here.'

The judge nodded. Sir Darcy was brief.

‘Were you present at the baccarat game which is the subject of this action?'

‘Yes.'

‘What is your opinion as to Sir Ratcliffe's guilt?'

‘Oh,' said Mr Van Deusen a shade dolefully. ‘I have no doubt that he cheated. None at all. They would have made short shrift of him in a Western township.'

The courtroom erupted again. Mr Van Deusen was the most popular person in it.

‘Thank you, Mr Van Deusen, that will be all.'

Mr Van Deusen, an absent smile on his face, began to step down from the witness box. The judge said, ‘One moment, sir. Defence counsel will wish to cross-examine you.'

‘Oh, indeed. I apologise to him and to you. I thought I was finished.'

It was Sir Halbert who was finished. Mr Van Deusen was immovable. At one point in his cross-examination, when Mr Van Deusen was playing him as though he were a mad bull, taking his eye-glasses on and off, the baffled Sir Halbert leaned forward, saying, ‘In your evidence you called Mr Grant an innocent. Are you aware of Mr Grant's rampant career in the financial world of the United States? Do you still call him an innocent?'

‘Oh, I meant him an innocent as a Westerner. I expressed no opinion on his Eastern career. I was not asked.'

‘Well, I am asking you now, Mr Van Deusen.'

Off came the gold-rimmed spectacles again. Sir Halbert drew a sharp breath, thought of saying something, but refrained. The man opposite to him was nearly as slippery a customer as his friend, Mr Grant, and that was saying something!

‘I am a banker, sir,' the Professor said at last. ‘My admiration for Mr Grant's financial career is unbounded!'

It was useless. Sir Darcy declined to re-examine and Mr Van Deusen waited patiently until the judge told him to step down before he adjourned the case for the day. Walker and his cohorts would be going home empty-handed.

‘I shall hear final submissions tomorrow,' the judge ended, ‘unless either of you have any further witnesses to bring before the court.'

Both counsel declined. Together in the changing room, Sir Halbert said drily to his fellow knight, ‘He's lying, you know, your client.'

‘Oh, no. Honest as the day is long is Master Cobie Grant.'

‘So I'd noticed. And his professorial friend, too.'

‘Can't prove otherwise, can you?' countered Sir Darcy. ‘Judge let you have too much leeway when you were cross-examining him. Tried to blacken him without real proof. Good ploy if you can get away with it.'

‘Which I did.' Sir Halbert smiled.

‘For a time, old fellow, for a time. You can't prove your goat white, either.'

‘I grant you your man's as brass-faced as they come. Like his uncle, Sir Alan, isn't he, in more than looks? All charm on top, ruthless underneath.'

Sir Darcy was cheerful, ‘I thought he proved that the gossip about his being a Dilhorne bastard wasn't true.'

‘Oh, but he lies like truth, doesn't he?'

‘Devious bastard, I'll grant you that.' Sir Darcy laughed at his own pun.

‘Has the Prince's protection, too. Now why should that be?'

Sir Darcy had no idea, and said so. He said, on their leaving the room, ‘Care to bet on the verdict?'

Sir Halbert smiled at him. ‘Not on this one. Depends on how many Methodists are on the jury.'

Which was no more than Violet Kenilworth had said earlier that day.

D
inah and Violet were waiting for Cobie and Kenilworth in the hall outside the courtroom.

Violet said, ‘What an exciting life you must have led, Cobie—whichever version of the truth of it one cares to accept!'

Kenilworth snorted angrily, ‘Now, Violet,' for he had listened to the traducing of his friend—for so he thought of Cobie—with mounting indignation.

‘Never mind,' said Cobie smoothly. ‘I much prefer Mr Van Deusen's version of my life, don't you, Violet?'

‘Oh, you were never innocent,' returned Violet. ‘I don't believe that for one moment. On the other hand—' and she shrugged her beautiful shoulders.

‘On the other hand, you can't see me as a dirty gunman.'

‘Well, as your friend said. The mind does boggle.'

Dinah's mind didn't boggle. She was sure that it was true, all of it. She remembered Cobie and Mr Van Deusen laughing together at Moorings. She knew, too, that Mr Van Deusen had lied when he had said that he had taught Cobie things, and could beat him at chess. He had specifically told her otherwise at Moorings, and she didn't think that he had
been lying. Most of all, she remembered her dreams and visions of Cobie…

But she didn't say so. When Mr Van Deusen came out, and said ‘Good evening,' to them all in his cool way, both Cobie and Lord Kenilworth shook him by the hand. Lord Kenilworth said how fortunate it was that Mr Van Deusen had been with Grant in the South West and could refute the lies Sir Ratcliffe's counsel was telling about him.

Dinah still said nothing other than, ‘Mr Van Deusen, I would like to thank you for what you have done on my husband's behalf. It would please me greatly if you would come home and take supper with us.'

He looked at Cobie, who by a slight inclination of his head showed his willingness to back Dinah's invitation.

‘With pleasure, Lady Dinah, if it will not be too much for you after a long day in court.'

‘Not so long,' she said, ‘as the day which you and Cobie have spent there.'

That was that.

Dinah left the two men together in the drawing room at Park Lane while she went upstairs to change. Cobie offered his friend brandy, saying, ‘My thanks are the most heartfelt of all, Professor. You were so good in the witness box that I could almost believe you when you were describing my innocence, my total lack of ability to be any such rapscallion as Jake Coburn was.'

‘Now, Jake,' said the Professor mildly. ‘You know better than that. The truth always sounds well, in court or out of it. I was only describing the young man you told me you were when you first arrived in the West. The tale you told to me on the night before we took Bratt's Crossing apart—and blew up the mine.'

Cobie laughed. ‘Sir Halbert got his facts wrong there,
didn't he? It was two mines I blew up in the Territories, not one.'

‘Yup. Now you own both. Where and how did they find you out, Jake? I can't believe
you
talked—and I certainly didn't. Too much to lose.'

Cobie frowned. ‘That I don't know. I don't think that the Pinkerton agent who traced me for my father would have talked, either. And Jack certainly wouldn't have done. He was probably shocked to his marrow at what his cherub of a son had done—and preferred to forget it. I know that he never told my mother.'

There was a knock on the door. It was his private secretary, a letter in his hand.

‘This arrived at your office this evening, sir, marked urgent, so it has been forwarded here by messenger.'

‘Urgent, eh? You'll excuse me a moment, Hendrick.'

The letter bore a United States postmark. His face as he read it never changed, but something in his bearing told the Professor that he was disturbed.

Cobie tore the letter open and read it. He said, ‘It is from an old enemy who carried out some dirty tricks, including a theft at Pinkerton's office, to discover that Jumping Jake and Jacobus Grant were the same person.'

He didn't immediately tell Hendrick that it was Sophie Massingham, the fat middle-aged widow, who had once been a great beauty and his mother's cousin, and who had been the wicked cause of his illegitimacy, who had sent it.

‘By the time you read this,' she had written, ‘dear second cousin Cobie Grant, I understand that you will have been confronted in the witness box with your murky past in Arizona Territory. I have asked your opponent, Sir Ratcliffe Heneage, to forward this to you when that has happened. You will doubtless be delighted to learn that, as an old and
good friend, I have been supplying him with the funds to fight his case.

‘I hope that if it doesn't help to sink you, it will have destroyed what reputation you still have. If you wish to know who gave you away, it was your dear mother Marietta who, like you, cheated me of what I wanted—in her case twenty-two years before you so insulted me by refusing my offer of an affair.

‘She told our cousin Julie that your father, Jack, had put a Pinkerton agent on your trail when you disappeared in the South West in 1881. Julie told me of it at the time. When I learned that you were to be a witness in this case against my old friend, Sir Ratcliffe Heneage, I arranged to have Pinkerton's offices burgled and the report on you stolen. I couldn't believe that what Marietta later told Julie was true—that you had simply been travelling and sketching after resigning your position at Bratt's Crossing.

‘I saw you not long after you came back from the West—and you didn't resemble at all the silly boy who had so rudely refused what I had so kindly offered you. Something had happened to you there, and Jack hadn't seen fit to tell her.

‘Something had—hadn't it? I laughed when I read of it. If I had wanted my revenge on you for your high-minded gaucherie, I certainly got it when I then informed you of your illegitimacy. But I wanted more than that, and what I discovered of your lurid career in the South West was a useful bonus.

‘The only drawback was that I found that half the evidence was missing—the record of your doubtless equally lurid career in Bratt's Crossing had been destroyed before the report was placed in the files. What you got up to in San Miguel really ought to be enough, though, if not to hang
you, but to finish you socially once and for all, don't you think?'

So it would have done, thought Cobie numbly, if it had not been for the Professor—and Jack. For Jack must have paid the Pinkerton agent to destroy the story of his downfall at Bratt's Crossing and his subsequent revenge. Something had to be left in the report to justify the agent's wanderings—and that had been the story of what had happened at San Miguel, sitting in the files like a time-bomb waiting to explode until Sophie's paid thief arrived to steal it.

The Professor's keen eyes were on him. He tossed the letter over: he couldn't immediately speak of it. That Sophie's spite and malice, caused by Jack preferring Marietta to her, should have been kept alive over the thirty years since Marietta and Jack had first met was unbelievable. His own rejection of her sexual favours had simply added fuel to that fire. He should have remembered that jealousy is as cruel as the grave.

The Professor handed the letter back, his face wry. ‘The bitch. But it explains where Heneage has been getting his money from. You know, Jake, with two such hardened cases after you, I think that you ought to be wary, mind your back—or let someone else mind it for you.'

‘Are you offering me back-up again, Professor? Another thing to thank you for.'

‘Thank me when the verdict's in and you're safe, and not before.'

Cobie, drinking for once since the day had been a hard one, tossed his brandy down his throat in an uncharacteristically careless gesture.

‘Oh, I know what the verdict will be. They'll find against Sir Ratcliffe. You sank him this afternoon. The jury will resent such a scurrilous attack on a witness which proved to have no foundation.'

‘I don't think your counsel thinks that that verdict is inevitable, Jake.'

‘No?' Up went Cobie's perfect eyebrows. ‘I'd bet on it, Professor, but not with you. Keep your money. Let no one say I never show my gratitude. One more toast, eh? Here's to old times.'

They drank together, laughing at their memories. And if for Cobie they were bittersweet, the face of poor dead Belita rising before him for a moment before he joined Dinah for dinner, there was nothing to show in his manner either to his wife or his friend.

Sir Ratcliffe thought that he was going to lose, too. He was living in a stew of fear. The three dead children weighed heavily on his mind. Oh, not because of what he had done to them, but because of what might be done to him if the police finally tracked him down.

His defences were crumbling about him—only Sophie Massingham remained staunch, she and her bottomless purse. Linfield, his right-hand man, his good strong arm, had disappeared, and then it had been reported in the press that he had been fished out of the Thames. After that, a trembling Mason had come to him frightened by the news.

‘Fust Hoskyns was found dead,' he had whined, ‘and now Linfield. It will be me or you next. Linfield said some society swine named Grant was after us as well as the police, had sicced Porter on to us, and had then done for him. Linfield said he was going to do for the police, too, but someone did for him. His neck was broken before he went into the river. I'm off, I tell you.'

He had argued, threatened and cajoled. But it had been Linfield who had kept Mason in line, and nothing he could say to him had answered. Oh, he had been certain who the society swine was—he had known ever since he had written
to Sophie Massingham as soon as he had left Markendale. What she had discovered for him about Grant's criminal Western past had finally convinced him that it
was
Grant who had been patiently stalking him ever since he had killed Lizzie Steele

So now he had two fears. One, that the verdict would go against him which he thought likely after that swine Van Deusen's lying performance in the witness box, and the other, that the police had found Mason and were squeezing a confession from him.

Well, if that were so, he had that double-dyed bastard Grant to thank for his ruin. He swore to himself, whatever happened, he would take the devil down with him. Without Grant none of this would have happened. He even thought that his damned wife had run away from him because of Grant. Something she had said, just before she had left him, stuck in his craw.

He grimaced. Yes, Grant would pay. If he were going to swing, he might as well swing for something, not nothing. In Sir Ratcliffe's world, three dead girl children from the slums counted as nothing.

Dinah and Cobie spent the last night of the Markendale action in one another's arms. She had said to him, once they were alone together, ‘It was all true, wasn't it? What counsel said. And what you and Mr Van Deusen said in the witness box was all fairy stories.'

Cobie said, tongue in cheek, his eyes almost merry, ‘The jury will decide tomorrow who is lying—and who is telling the truth.'

Dinah was suddenly angry with him. ‘Don't juggle words with me, Cobie. I know you too well,' and then, ‘The bath was in the whorehouse, wasn't it?'

For a moment he couldn't think of what she was speak
ing, and then he remembered the time he had made love to her in the bath and their conversation afterwards.

‘Oh, Dinah, Dinah, you're a wonder. You note that I admit nothing. What will you surprise me with next?'

Almost Dinah told him about the baby—but not with the shadow of the lawsuit hanging over them. Tomorrow night, she thought, win or lose, we can celebrate, and be happy in private.

She said, a little shyly, ‘Cobie, is there anything I can do for you? What you did or didn't do in Arizona Territory means nothing to me, you know.'

He said into her neck. ‘Nothing, Dinah. Just be Dinah, that's all.'

After that they made love, gently, as though both of them were precious porcelain and might shatter. The ecstasy was so long and sweet that Dinah fell asleep after it almost immediately.

Not surprisingly, while asleep, she met Cobie in the land of her dreams. He was a very young man again, the man she now knew had been Jumping Jake Coburn, with his long hair, his tanned and bearded face, and his bright blue eyes—the eyes she would have recognised anywhere. They were in the desert and behind him was a range of mountains, mauve against a sky as blue as his eyes. He came towards her, smiling.

She was so pleased to see him that she flung her arms around him and kissed him before asking, ‘And where is Mr Van Deusen? I mean, Schultz.'

‘Back there,' he told her, waving a hand towards the bottom of the slight slope on which they stood where a small town nestled in a hollow. ‘But what are you doing here, Dinah, so far from home?'

‘Home,' she told him. ‘This is my home since my home is always with you, wherever you are. Is this the place of
which Sir Halbert spoke today? The place where you blew up a train?'

He held her away from him and repeated what he had said to her earlier, in that other life, ‘Oh, Dinah, you're a wonder. Will nothing ever surprise you?'

She pointed at the little town, and said eagerly, ‘Take me there. I should like to see it.'

He shook his head. ‘Alas, much though I love you, I may not. There, I am the age that I was then, and were I to take you into San Miguel—that outlaws' sanctuary—you would become the little girl you were ten years ago, which would never do. I love you too much to do that to you.'

He had told her that he loved her, not once but twice! And he had never said that to her in their daytime life. Even as she thought this he, and the scenery in which they stood, began to fade, and before she could ask herself why this should be, she was asleep.

And in the morning she forgot that he had at last confessed his love for her; even if she had remembered him saying so, she might, regretfully, have dismissed it as a wish come true—which could only happen in a dream.